Since many years ICCU has been devoting  itself in protecting Italy musical  bibliographical heritage through the diffusion of standards for its use and the implementation of cooperative cataloguing and recovery projects in SBN, which digitisation projects financed by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism are also related to.

 

ICCU, in collaboration with libraries and musical institutions, manages an archive of records related to musical material (formerly known as the Music Bibliographic Database, established in 1990), most of which come from two main printed catalogues: the catalogue of the Music Collection Research Office (Ufficio Ricerca Fondi Musicali - URFM) created by Claudio Sartori – particularly rich in 19th century material – related to printed music, and the catalogue set up by the Music Bibliography Institute (IBIMUS) related to manuscript music.
These catalogues have been augmented over time by music collections catalogued by libraries and musical institutes through SBN Musica, a music cataloguing PC software no longer in use. Since 2004, material related to music is stored in the SBN Index system; it is integrated with the modern book and ancient book databases and is being augmented online.

 

Besides allowing the integration with other materials, the new version of the SBN Index makes it possible to catalogue musical material through specific data entries, thus enabling to complete the bibliographic records - both those already existing in the SBN database and those catalogued ex novo - with elements related to the musical compositions contained in the documents. It is also possible to use import/export features in the UNIMARC format.

 

The music material described in SBN includes manuscript music, printed music and librettos from the 16th century onwards, localized in over than 500 public and private institutions, including Italy main music libraries, such as the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan, the Santa Cecilia Conservatory and Academy in Rome, and the San Pietro a Majella Conservatory in Naples. There are currently about 870,000 of such records in SBN.

The records archives of related to musical material are available online on the OPAC SBN and Internet Culturale